News and comments on community broadband networks, the communities deploying them and the technologies that support them. Published by Denise Frey and Al Bonnyman.
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Monday, June 16, 2003

A few days ago, I noted that the Joint Powers Telecommunications Board (JPTB) for the towns of Rock Springs and Green River, Wyoming seemed to be poised to build a FTTH (fiber to the home) system for the towns based on FTTH vendor Alloptic's products. A new article notes that Alloptic is investing $3 million of the 31.5 million to build the system. (75% of the funds would come from revenue bonds, the remainder from 2 private investors, one of them Alloptic).

The article reports that the proposed project received negative criticism from local residents at a JPTB meeting last week. It's not clear from the article whether this was a truly spontaneous gathering of concerned citizens or something orchestrated by the local incumbent telephone and cable TV providers. I noticed the system was described as a threat to senior citizens:
"The county's senior citizens may also suffer under the proposed Southwestern Wyoming Enhanced and Expanded Telecommunications (SWEETnet) system, a small crowd of Green River residents told officials involved in the project during a public meeting Wednesday night."

In other FTTH initiatives, incumbent service providers have intensively lobbied senior citizens with phone calls giving them misinformation (a polite word for lying) on how much they'll be harmed. Apparently falsely scaring, then organizing senior citizens has become a useful tactic for some CATV companies. For more on this sort of thing, just ask FTTH supporters in the Illinois Tri-Cities or Provo, Utah.

This is where it would be really useful for the folks in Wyoming to get some help from a grass-roots political and marketing veteran of these wars like Annie Collins (Tri-Cities Broadband Coalition).